Hapara Highlights helps you see what learners are doing in the Google Chrome Browser in near-real-time. Feedback mechanisms allow you to reinforce pro-learning behavior and re-direct unfocused behavior. You can remotely open or close a browser tab on learner devices to re-focus them to the task at hand. You can share files, sites or URLs with your students easily.

Hapara Highlights also allows you to directly send messages to students and provide more personalized and private feedback. Highlights supports you in engaging students in conversations about their learning and online behavior. You can also tag activities to provide guidance and feedback at any time.

Hapara believes that you are at your best when guiding students towards becoming great 21st century digital citizens. Highlights supports you in this goal.

Features such as session recording, blacklisting URL’s, and remotely controlling student devices are not supported by Hapara Highlights.

The Browser Tabs view allows you to see sites/URLs opened and closed by students in their browser since the start of your Highlights session. The page displays the items most recently opened by your students:

By default, Highlights displays up to 5 URLs within each student panel. This can be adjusted by clicking on ‘5 items’ in the top right action bar as seen below, and selecting the number of items you want to see. Up to 25 items can be displayed. Increasing the number of items displayed on student panels will increase the size of the student panels.

Current Screens

The Current Screens view allows you to view each student's currently open tab.

The Current Screens view requires more school network bandwidth. So screen images are only sent when the you have the Current Screens tab open. Your school System Administrator may choose to reduce the bandwidth used by reducing the quality of the images shown.

To have a closer look at a student screen, click on the required student panel. An enlarged image of the student screen will be shown.

You can download the image by clicking the ‘Save’ button.

Snaps

The Snaps feature lets you make a digital note of students' online activity for reference at a later stage. For example, you may have noticed a student activity of interest, which you want to explore or investigate further in order to better support the learning and development of your student or guide them towards more focused or appropriate behavior.

To create a Snap click on the camera icon which appears in a few places on the Activity Viewer page.

The Snaps tab allows you to see all snaps recorded over the past 7 days:

The page has three panels:

Snap List. Lists all Snaps recorded over the past 7 days.

Snap Summary. Displays a summary of the specific snap selected in the Snap List

Send Feedback. Displays the feedback template teachers can use to start conversations and provide guidance to the student(s).

The Send Message feature lets you send targeted messages to selected students, groups or the whole class. This feature is described in detail here.

Open Tabs

You can open tab(s) on the browser of selected student(s) using the Open Tabs feature. This feature is described in detail here.

Focused Browsing

When opening tabs for your students, you can decide to focus your students on just the new browser tab(s) for a set period of time using the Focused Browsing feature. When a Focused Browsing session is active, students can’t open new tabs, swap to other tabs or browse to new sites or URLs. This feature is described in detail here.

Close Tabs

In the student panel of the Browser Tabs view, you can click the X to the right of a site or URL, and that tab will be closed on the student device.

Shared Usability Features

The Highlights module shares some usability features with the other Hapara modules, including:

The Sort Student Panels feature enables you to sort the order of your student panels in a number of ways using the three icons shown below:

If you have manually organised the layout in other Hapara functions (Dashboard, Gmail, Sharing as well as within Highlights), you may want to replicate them in the views you are using within Highlights. To copy the layout from another part of the Hapara solutions:

Click on the Copy layout icon

Select the layout you want to copy

Student Groups

You can create, edit, filter and rename student groups directly from Highlights. To do this:

simply select the group functionality by clicking on the group icon

create a group by entering a name in the desired colour

edit a group by changing the name of that group and replacing it by a new name

The Show Groups feature allows you to display the order of your student panels by simply clicking on a group colour. To do this:

simply click on the group colour you wish to sort by, directly from any of the student panels in the group.

Sort by Online/Offline

Teachers can also sort students in Highlights by whether the student is online. This allows teachers to either focus only on students that are currently online (removing absent students, for example) or to quickly identify students who are offline.

To use this feature, just click the Sort button on the top right of the screen, and choose either “Online First” or “Offline First” to sort students in Highlights accordingly.

French Localization

To access a French version of Highlights:

Click on teacher name (at top right of Highlights screen).

Click "language" to open a Google page for language preferences.

Follow the Google instructions to add/select the French language.

Go back to the Highlights page and refresh it.

For the extension, you simply need to set the primary language of your device to French.

Thanks to the Student Connection alert, which indicates the number of student issues during an open Highlights session, you can now immediately see when student panels do not upload students’ browsing activity correctly.

Possible issues include:

the student information does not appear

the student is logged into several devices

there are several students logged into the same one device

Student information does not appear

Sometimes, a student panel may not display any sites, documents or URLs, or may even display an error like the one below:

The Highlights Extension has a self-diagnostic test for individual student devices to help understand the causes of a blank student panel, and in many cases, fix the problem as part of the process. This is accessed from the student device by opening the Chrome browser and clicking on the Hapara icon:

A student can be simultaneously logged into the many devices (eg: laptop at home, chromebook at school, iPad, smartphone). The Highlights module "sees" all the devices the student is logged in to, and can't automatically choose which Chrome browser to display by default to the teacher. In this situation Highlights:

shows the multi-device icon in the student panel

provides more information in a pink panel and provides a way to easily resolve the situation (described in detail here).

Multiple Students logged into the same device

Multiple student can be simultaneously logged into the same one device (say a laptop). The Highlights module "sees" all the students and can't automatically choose which student to display to the teacher. In this situation Highlights:

If you find that Highlights is very slow, it may be due to your school network environment. In this case, contact your System Administrator who will be able to adjust Highlights bandwidth parameters e.g. reducing the volume and frequency of updates to Highlights, reducing the quality of the screenshot images and/or removing the screenshot functionality to increase the speed of Highlights.

Raising a problem with Hapara Support

In the first instance, we recommend running diagnostics from the student device. This runs an automated self-diagnostic check which also has built in resolution capabilities which can self resolve, or advise how to fix commonly experienced issues.

If using the student diagnostic check did not explain the student connectivity, then the teacher can send details of the issue to Hapara by clicking on the "investigate" link in the offline student panel:

On clicking "Send" the information the teacher entered in the form is sent to Hapara Support for further investigation.